When we imagine the villages, towns, and cities of Europe before 1800, we see these places bustling with nuclear families—husbands, wives, and their children. We know, of course, that some people were neither spouses nor children, but they appear to us as random individuals caught temporarily at awkward points in the game of making marriages and sustaining conjugal families. Orphans needed surrogate parents; adult daughters and sons awaited marriage; widows and widowers missed old partners and perhaps sought new ones. Indeed, marriage was so much the destiny of most adults in traditional Europe that in some languages—English among...

Historical demography, which focuses on the characteristics of earlier populations (such as their age, sex, marital status, and family forms), as well as the processes which helped to shape their size and composition (for example, fertility, nuptiality, mortality, and migration) probably has more to tell us about singlewomen in the European past than any other discipline. Given appropriate sources, historical demographers not only can help us distinguish between life-cycle and lifelong singlewomen, but can also offer us firm data on the actual numbers and proportions of singlewomen in specific places and times. By focusing on entire populations, not just the...

I am inclined to believe that late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris had a substantial population of women who never married and who stood outside of any formal religious life. However, as Maryanne Kowaleski indicates in this volume, we have very little trustworthy demographic information on singlewomen for the period before 1348. Indeed, such women are extremely difficult to find, or to differentiate from other women, in the Parisian sources for this period. As I suggest in the first section of this essay, this obscurity was due, in part, to the way in which records were kept, and to the...

Western Europe has seen more lifelong singlewomen in its midst than any other part of the world, at least in documented centuries.¹ Of course singlewomen differed in their reasons for remaining single, and an entire continuum from preference to coercion dictated the terms under which women negotiated the critical decision about marriage or no marriage in their lives. A woman referred to as ancilla, the Roman term for female chattel slave that remained in use through the medieval centuries, stands at the extreme end of the continuum. Women slaves negotiated no decision about remaining single—custom and law dictated a...

In her 1962 classic Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown, later editor of Cosmopolitan and creator of the “Cosmo Girl,” urged unmarried women to have not just jobs but careers, on the grounds that “a married woman already is something.... Whatever hardships she endures in marriage, one of them is not that she doesn’t have a place in life.”¹ This theme—the lack of social space or social identity for the singlewoman—has been taken up for the medieval and early modern periods by many of the other essays in this volume. In explaining that women could be...

In a celebrated moment in Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence, the eponymous heroine, who has been brought up as a boy in order to protect her birthright, wonders at the onset of puberty—age twelve—whether she should continue to enjoy the social privileges of a boy who rides and hunts or whether she should assume her “natural” female role, which includes sewing and playing amorous games (Silence, 2496-2688).¹ Underscoring the social import of this question, the allegorical characters, Nature, Nurture, and Reason participate in the debate. Silence decides to remain “on top” by maintaining her disguise as a...

Scholarly interest in singlewomen in the medieval period has a very long history in Germany. In the late nineteenth century, when social commentators and academics throughout Europe (and the United States) were debating what to do with “surplus” and “redundant” women who were not able to marry, the German archivist and historian Karl Bücher looked backward to see if this had been a problem before. Using several population counts from the fifteenth century, he determined that there had been a significant “surplus of women” (Frauenüberschuβ) in German cities during that time, perhaps as much as 125 women for every 100...

When asked whether there were any known witches in her neighborhood, a witness in a 1625 Venetian witchcraft trial replied, “No, they are all married women [sono tutte donne maritate].”¹ Her statement expressed a social truth about early modern Venice: when they had no man to control them, women were perceived as particularly dangerous. The Single state, then, was an undesirable condition for Venetian women. Women recognized this. Upper-class women left money to the dowries of their female servants and the poorer women in their neighborhoods. Hoping to increase the chances that such women might marry, testators sometimes even specified...

When Fanny Burney’s novel Camilla appeared in 1796, it featured a singlewoman, Mrs. Mittin, who provided a telling comment on the importance of marital status to women in her time. She confided to a close friend: “Do you know, for all I call myself Mrs., I’m single.... The reason I’m called Mrs. is ... because I’d a mind to be taken for a young widow, on account everybody likes a young widow; and if one is called Miss, people being so soon to think one an old maid, that it’s disagreeable.”¹ Mrs. Mittin knew what modern historians of women have...

Sometimes a picture says it all—or almost all. “Dear, the whole family wants to know why you’re not married!” says a harried 1950s cartoon mother to her handsome, mannishly dressed daughter in a pinup postcard much loved by lesbians of my generation. Her daughter, on her way out the door (we assume) to some gay assignation, hunts for a response and comes up with: “Tell them ... tell them I forgot.” This picture wittily parodies traditional injunctions to women to find a man, highlighting, for the lesbian viewer at any rate, their irrelevance to women who have discovered the...

In 1713 a fiercely misogynist twelve-page poem appeared anonymously on a London scene where venomous satires against women were commonplace. But instead of attacking women in general, as such works were wont to do,¹ this pamphlet singled out a constituency that formal satire had hitherto overlooked: never-married women, now known as old maids.² Indeed, one explicit objective of this Satyr Upon Old Maids was to fill a discursive vacuum: while “Antiquated Maids” have been “everlasting Theams for Railery,” says the author, they have hitherto “gone free” from sustained attack because they are so “odious” and “impure” a “Dunghil” as to...